Friends and Family

Since Thanksgiving and the Holiday gift giving season is upon us I'll talk about something super important especially at this time of the year, FRIENDS and FAMILY.

There is some debate to how important it is for the person you're dating to get along with your friends and family or for you to get along with theirs. Ideally, everyone would love everyone and things would run smoothly. Alas, this is not an ideal world and sometimes there are personality clashes. In those circumstances it's important to remember that it is in your best interest to play nice. So avoid controversial topics like religion and politics and if keep digging and want to get into it, try some of the tips here. It's for avoiding conversations about religion but it's pretty applicable to avoiding any topics! Basically it says, resist arguing, change the subject, telling them that you're not comfortable with discussing the topic etc. I also like the idea of agreeing to disagree. I do this with patrons at work too, I told a patron who wanted to get into politics with me, "I appreciate your viewpoint but I don't agree with it." He keeps trying to get me to debate him though...some people just like to argue and are bored so you have to be careful with those kinds of folks.

Also try to find common ground. Odds are they won't be gamers...so talk about more neutral subjects like food and movies and books if they read. Telling them all about your half-orc bard who has to struggle against racism and a shockingly low charisma score isn't going to win you any non-gamer friends, so save the geek talk for your buddies.

Don't insult them. Saying that football is the worst sport in the world at a Superbowl party is a pretty bad idea. Insulting the cooking at Thanksgiving also bad. Don't criticism their housekeeping, their dog, their children, their hobbies, anything that is just plain rude. It's not really your job to police their lives. If they want to live in squalor, that's their choice, just be discreet about using napkins to open doors and stuff. If the role was reversed it'd be really rude for someone to come to your house and refuse to use the bathroom b/c it's "too dirty". The only time I did that was at a wedding with over 100 people and only two portapotties...I think that was justifiable. But I also didn't tell the hosts that either and we were still there for like five hours.

Hopefully you'd all like each other. I mean the entire point of friendster is that people you like should all get along right? So if you do have things in common, awesome. But then you have to think about, how much do you want to share with them? I'm not saying don't make friends, but do you want to be sharing hilarious and wrong stories about your significant other? It's one of those things where I tend not to mind b/c I'm not a huge secret keeper, but some people like to keep their lives a little private so it's important to make sure your significant other is comfortable with you becoming like BFFS with their friends and family.

And heaven forbid you become super good friends with their friends and family and you end up breaking up? Do you have to divide up your friends? Set up visitation rights? It gets complicated. I'm not saying don't do it, but sometimes when people are friends with a couple, people take sides and you might not like which side they end up on...especially if it's family (ala She's Out of Your League which was really just an awkward movie all over, but when the guy broke up with the girl, she was really close with the family and she stayed living in the house.)

Probably one of the hardest things is when your significant other and your family/friends just don't get along...this can make for tense times especially around the holidays. The best thing to do is make sure that you still make time for everyone b/c the last thing you want to do is mess up your relationship with your friends and family over someone you're dating.

So have a Happy Turkey Day and I hope you're enjoying it with your friends and/or family! :)